Should Your Church Hire Help or Do It Yourselves?

Once a congregation decides it wants to reach people online, the very next question is a practical one. Do we handle this ourselves, or do we bring in someone to help?

We help churches with this work, so you’d reasonably expect us to argue for hiring. We’re not going to. Plenty of congregations should do this themselves, at least for now, and some of them do it beautifully. What matters is knowing honestly which situation you’re in, because choosing wrong in either direction wastes something precious: either the Lord’s money, or months of a faithful volunteer’s time.

Here’s how we’d help you think it through.

Start With What This Work Actually Requires

The mistake most churches make is assuming the question is about skill. It isn’t, mostly. It’s about three things together, and the third is the one that quietly decides everything.

So the real question isn’t “could someone here do this?” It’s “will someone here still be doing this eighteen months from now?”

When You Should Do It Yourselves

Handle it in house when you have a genuine, specific person, not a hopeful idea of one. If you can name them, they’ve agreed, and they’re actually excited about it, that’s a real asset.

Do it yourselves when that person has margin in their life, not just willingness. Zeal without time produces guilt, then burnout, then silence.

Do it yourselves when your congregation is in a season where money is genuinely needed elsewhere. Faithful outreach from a willing member costs nothing but time, and God has never been limited by a small budget.

And do it yourselves when you want to start small and learn. There’s real wisdom in a congregation getting its own hands dirty for six months before paying anyone. You’ll understand the work far better, and you’ll be a much smarter partner if you ever do hire someone.

One honest caution though. If your plan is “we’ll ask around and find somebody,” you don’t have a plan yet. Get the specific yes first.

When You Should Bring in Help

Bring in help when the honest answer to “who will own this?” is silence, or a name followed by “well, maybe.” A church that keeps waiting to find the right volunteer often waits years, and the searching people in your community are searching right now.

Bring in help when it’s already been tried and faded. If your church has started twice and gone quiet twice, that’s not a character flaw, it’s information. Something about the arrangement isn’t sustainable, and repeating it a third time probably won’t change that.

Bring in help when your volunteer is carrying it faithfully but drowning. This one matters more than churches realize. The brother or sister keeping it all afloat while quietly running out of gas is worth protecting. Taking the work off their plate isn’t a luxury, it’s caring for a servant.

Bring in help when you want the reach to be serious. There’s a real difference between a modest, faithful presence and a deliberate effort to reach your whole community, and the second one takes more hands and more strategy than most congregations have internally.

And bring in help when you need someone to think with you, not just produce for you. Knowing what to do, in what order, is its own kind of work.

The Answer Is Often Both

This is what we’d actually recommend to most congregations, and it’s what the choice usually looks like in practice.

Very few churches should hire out everything. The personal parts, the warmth, the follow-up, the real conversations, the members sharing with their own friends, cannot be outsourced and shouldn’t be. What can be handed off is the heavy, technical, repetitive work: the editing, the publishing, the consistency, the strategy.

So the strongest arrangement usually keeps the relational work firmly in the hands of your people and gives the grinding work to someone whose actual job it is. Your members do what only they can do. Somebody else makes sure it goes out every week.

Decide Honestly, Then Commit

Whichever way you land, the worst outcome is a half-decision, where everyone assumes someone else is handling it and nothing happens for a year.

So talk it through plainly and answer three questions out loud. Who specifically owns this? What can they realistically sustain? And what happens if they can’t? If you have good answers, do it yourself with confidence. If you don’t, hiring help is not a failure of faithfulness. It’s a reasonable way to make sure the work actually happens.

And if you want a straight answer about which one fits your congregation, we’re glad to talk it through with nothing riding on it. We’ve told churches to handle it themselves before, and we’ll do it again when that’s the right counsel.